Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/754

734 of character, and it has become well known throughout the United States. There are as many as a score of practitioners of psychometry who will send a written description of the character connected with any manuscripts sent them, and a number of physicians who, with great success, use their psychometric power for the diagnosis of the condition of patients at a distance.

But experiments and investigations would be entirely useless if Dr. Carpenter could succeed in his aim to build an impassable wall for the exclusion of all essentially novel truths, by denying the competency of scientific testimony to introduce new facts foreign to his own cramped conceptions of Nature.

To exclude the multitudinous facts of mesmerism, including the vast number of surgical operations and marvelous cures in which it has been employed by Dr. Esdaile, Dr. Elliotson, and hundreds of others of unquestionable character—to exclude the facts of spiritualism witnessed by millions, and to combine all the incompatible powers of medical and clerical bigotry now, as the Aristotelians and Romish priests combined against Galileo—is a task in which his success will hardly equal that of Lactantius in denouncing the wicked innovations which asserted the existence of the antipodes.



HE late presidential election appears likely, in its results, to mark an epoch not only in the political history of the United States, but in that of all constitutional countries. In the person of the new President the American Government has come out of party and is trying to be the government of the whole nation. Sir Robert Peel tried the same thing in England, though in his case the "splendid perfidy" to party was less marked than in the case of Governor Hayes, because the repeal of the corn laws was not more essential to the interest of the country, which it rescued from death, than it was to that of the Conservative party, which it rescued from hopeless opposition to the nation and from utter political ruin. Party found a dagger with which to stab Sir Robert Peel. President Hayes has shown himself a strong man, but the greatest trials of his strength are still to come. When Congress meets he will have to contend both with the resentment of the regular managers of his own party and with the hostility of the thorough-going Democrats, who will see their opportunity in the breach between the President and the party which raised him to power, as the Whigs in 1846 saw their opportunity in the breach between Sir Robert Peel and the Protectionist section of his followers. Supposing, however, that President Hayes, like 